The chief executive of financial services giant SBI Holdings, Yoshitaka Kitao, has predicted that Japan’s next economic boom will be kick-started by blockchain and cryptocurrency, writes Hargreaves Lansdown.
Since the 1980s, when the country reached its economic hiatus, Japan has never revisited the level of growth which made Japan the powerhouse economy that Europe could only aspire to. In the 1970s, Japan had the world’s second-largest GDP after the US continuing through to the 1980s.
At the Japan Blockchain Conference this week in Tokyo, Yoshitaka said this was why he has been leading his company in the direction of cryptocurrency and its underlying technology, suggesting that the changes won’t be in the too distant future. SBI has continued its investment across the region investing USD 460 million in its AI and blockchain fund.
“There’s a lot of speculative demand around cryptocurrencies, which is why the price is going up so quickly, but people need to think about how these technologies are being used in real life and how they can improve people’s businesses,” he said.
Earlier this year, it was revealed that SBI had planned to launch a new cryptocurrency exchange and was also investing in renewable energy wind farm cryptocurrency mining cryptocurrency. Through these measures, and areas such as improved 5G mobile connectivity and AI, Yoshitaka sees that the time is right for creating an environment ripe for another economic boom.
Aaron McDonald, the chief executive of decentralized app marketplace Centrality, which closed a USD 80 million initial coin offering earlier this year, also sees the region led by Japan as the driving force behind cryptocurrency and associated product adoption.
As Bitcoin News recently reported, New Zealand company Centrality, which is partly Japanese-owned, sees the region as primed for the next boom, particularly in the field of Dapps suggesting that blockchain is an area which will help small companies catch up with its bigger competitors in terms of growth.
“We’re focused on the region because people in Japan are far further ahead than the rest of the world when it comes to blockchain and cryptocurrencies,” said McDonald.
Centrality CEO and co-founder Aaron McDonald thinks the company can help to level the playing field by helping smaller apps to collaborate and create enough value to be sustainable.
According to the cryptocurrency community in Japan, one factor likely to pull the industry back from again becoming an economic powerhouse once again is the over-regulation of the digital currency due to criminal activity in the space.
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